A Smart Greenwich Village Makeover by Stephen Shadley Keeps an Eye on the Bottom Line

Five thousand dollars? To take a plain one-bedroom prewar Greenwich Village apartment and turn it into a comfortable, good-looking, cleverly conceived home for a young urban couple? One that, furthermore, embodies solid design principles, says something about the clients’ origins, falls into place in a few short months and won’t fall apart as soon as the photographer packs up his tripod?

Come on, now, it’s not as shocking as all that.

“Reasonable materials abound,” says Shadley. “It’s what you do with them that counts.”

At least not when half of the couple is Kelley Jackson, an emerging designer and associate (of five years) of Stephen Shadley’s, and the two pros put their heads together and work various sleights of hand with simple but honest materials, unexpected craftspeople and old-fashioned elbow grease. And a point of view: “Never underestimate the importance of starting out with ideas,” explains Shadley. “It doesn’t matter what scale you’re working on. It helps to have a sense of where you’re starting and where you hope to end up.” “It’s the only way,” Jackson adds, “to figure out what needs to go on in between.”

Here are a few of the ideas that Shadley and Jackson brought to the apartment Jackson shares with her fiancé, Juan Garcia: Give fresh thought to familiar materials. Be true to your environment; don’t try to turn it into something it doesn’t want to be. Distill the best of a period. Less is preferable to more; don’t feel obliged to fill up a space with questionable things. Look for furniture that can be transformed by upholstery. Look for fabric that is high on integrity but low on cost. Be imaginative. Remember the bold power of paint—especially on the floor.

The floor?

“It was the biggest challenge,” says Jackson. “The rooms had nice proportions. There were pretty arches. Nothing had been chopped up. Even the walls had been freshly painted white. But someone had laid down generic, inexpensive parquet.”

Using a red enamel deck paint, Jackson did the work herself. She sent her doubting fiancé to friends, put a pork roast in the oven—to mask the smell in case anyone in her building, which is a rental, might disapprove—and got out the roller brush. The effect was immediate. The shell suddenly gained a sharp graphic quality. Now the real work could begin.

Jackson and Shadley took the red from one of the three or so pieces of furniture that the couple already had on hand. The cue came from a 1930s Monterey Buckaroo chair whose exaggerated playful form, festive painted decoration and large iron straps convey a nostalgia for the West that is all too suitable for Jackson and Garcia, who, though they met in New York, are both from Texas. Indeed, if the apartment can be said to gently reflect cultural influences, one is Texan and the other Asian, suggested by the second major piece the couple owned, a tansu that houses Jackson’s wardrobe.

The subtle tension of this West-meets-East yin-yang helps keep the apartment’s aesthetic organized and under a kind of informed control. “Working on a small budget is not a matter of just going out and finding bargains,” Shadley explains. “Reasonable materials abound. It’s what you do with them that counts.”

A perfect example of reasonable materials applied in a way that counts are the solid-core doors that Shadley and Jackson bought at a local lumberyard and joined together to form a long, low line in front of the bedroom windows. More doors formed a platform for the bed. All were painted red, so that the color would appear to rise up over the floor. The horizontality feels Asian; the bed, in fact the whole room, gains a sense of architecture; an unsightly radiator is masked—all for less than $500.

The ever-resourceful duo didn’t stop there. Bedside tables came from Catskill, New York, where Shadley has a country house, and are two slices cut out of a fallen cottonwood tree on his neighbor’s property. A Navajo blanket (previously on hand) got centered over the new headboard, for color, texture, pattern and a further nod to the West. Cowboy boots stepped out of the closet to serve as a witty accessory... when they’re not on Jackson’s feet.

The almost always unavoidable foundation of a living room is its sofa. On Jackson’s budget the logical place to begin, and in her lucky case to end, was the venerable New York thrift shop Housing Works, where she found an all-time bargain: a solid piece of furniture for $55. Jackson saw past the fussy flowered print, multiple cushions and overly rounded arms. She saw straight through to the workshop of a Pennsylvania upholsterer, Dave Erbe, of East Penn Upholstery, who replaced the multiple cushions with an unbroken single one, squared the arms and even raised the sofa a few inches off the ground before covering it in beige linen. “If you want to know the real key to doing things affordably,” Shadley confides, “it’s bringing together the resources of a big city like New York with the craftspeople of smaller towns.”

The apartment’s draperies are another perfect example. Jackson found the brown twill at Rosen & Chadick in New York, then took it home to Comfort, Texas, where her mother’s drapery maker, Irene Stehling, of Turkey Ridge Trading Company, sewed them up over the holidays. They coordinate with the round ottoman, a Jackson design fabricated by Erbe. Not only does its chocolate-brown leather echo the brown of the draperies, its top also lifts up to provide extra storage, all too useful in a compact Manhattan apartment. The rest was largely a matter of knowing where to go—and what to choose once they got there. Shadley went to Historical Materialism in Hudson, New York, for industrial-looking bedside lamps (he found them in pieces in the bargain room). Together, he and Jackson went to Just Shades on the Lower East Side for custom lampshades to suspend from ceiling fixtures and to Lot 76 on Houston Street for sturdy side chairs.

In nine weeks the apartment was finished. The new couple had a new home. And home, perhaps not so surprisingly, is a subject important to both Shadley and Jackson. “In New York, typically people just make do until they have a sense of where they’re going in life,” Shadley says, “and I think that’s a real mistake.” Jackson concurs: “As I hope this project proves, it doesn’t take a fortune to create a cohesive refuge in the city. New York can feel so temporary and transitional, especially when you’re starting out. Before you know it, five, six, seven years have passed. Why not get started sooner rather than later? All it takes is a few ideas, some lumber and a little legwork.” And, of course, a few cans of red paint.